Exactly
at its 10 years business cycle since the highly successful automatic Canon
AE-1
(1976) and 8 years after its first multi- mode Canon
A-1 (1978),
Canon brought another new concept camera to the highly competitive market place in
1986. Amidst the period of confusion between early attempts on AF models by various
manufacturers and more importantly, the early acceptance and the growing popularity
of compact cameras, SLR sales was sluggish, users were confused while manufacturers
kept rolling out model after model to the market laden with numerous features and
functions.

The Canon T90
was one of them. Should I say, its birth was a little untimely and its full potential
was never being truly realized - one tends to remember the A1 more clearly than the
T90 when associating Canon with the multimode automatic cameras, even though the
former fares poorly in comparison with the latter in all aspects. This is primarily
due to the fact the T90 has never had the longer life cycle that A1 enjoyed (it was
first marketed in 1978 before being discontinued in 1982 while the T90 has barely
a year to survive due to the market changes to the AF arena where the Minolta Maxxum
7000 was rocking the whole photographic world by storm and Canon has to make the
most drastic decision in its camera history by dropping the famed FD breech-lock
mount and replaced it with the new EF mount for the new EOS series AF cameras).

The Canon T90's appearance is designed by German industrial designer Luigi Colani,
and was the third model from the T series, after the T50 in 1983 and the T70 in 1984 (In total,
there were five T-series models including the T80, which was an autofocus
camera that was launched in 1985. But the T90 has cast more influences to Canon's
future designs of cameras as a whole than any other camera within their line-up.
It was a great camera by any standard, featuring some revolutionary innovations as
well as practical and very functional human engineering factors in its design. Thus,
five years after the Canon flagship model, the Canon
New F-1
was launched (1981), the T90 became the bridging model between the first full AF
model, the Canon 650, that was brought out by Canon barely a year later in March,
1987 and the older manual focus Canons. The life span of the Canon T90 was the shortest
and can also be considered the last of 's
e r i o u s'
FD-based manual focus SLR camera from Canon (The Canon T60 was launched in 1990)
- but it is also the most sophisticated automatic exposure 35mm SLR that Canon has
ever produced prior to the new EF
mounted
EOS
AF SLR cameras,
and was also affectionately nicknamed as 'the Tank" in Japan.